“Susse. Stop. Of course I have time. Are you okay?”
“I was okay until I heard your voice. Then it all came crashing back again. Sorry. I was so afraid. He was in such pain, and I could see in his eyes that he thought that … Damn it, Søren. He’s fifty-three. He can’t be turning into a heart patient.”
Ben had lived the hard life of a touring musician and had smoked twenty cigarettes a day for most of his life, although now he had quit. In Søren’s opinion, this placed him dead in the center of the target group for a heart attack, but there was no reason to say that out loud.
“I’ll take care of the dogs,” he said. “Call if there’s anything else I can do. Any time.”
“Thank you.”
He stood for a moment, thinking. Babko’s restless energy had worn off, and he was sitting in a slump.
I could get a patrol car to drive him back to headquarters, thought Søren. But on the other hand …
On the other hand, he was convinced that Babko could tell him more if he could just poke a hole in the Ukrainian’s jovial but uninformative façade. Perhaps it would help to get away from the uniforms and the coffee-and-adrenaline atmosphere. “Do you feel like helping me feed my ex-wife’s dogs?” he asked.
THERE WAS A string of belated Christmas lights along the white fence. There were birdseed balls on branches of the pear tree and dog tracks in the snow. Susse’s two cocker spaniels were barking eagerly, and even through the door you could hear the soft slaps of wagging tails hitting walls and furniture.
Søren unlocked the front door, and the dogs came leaping. They needed to pee so badly that they barely took the time to say hello.
“You meant it,” said Babko.
“Yes, of course. What did you think?”
Babko just shook his head. “Your ex-wife?”
“Yes. Her husband ended up in the hospital with a heart attack.” Common-law husband, actually, but Babko probably didn’t need those kinds of nuances. “Come on in. We might as well have a decent meal. You must be getting tired of cafeteria food.”
He could see that Babko was … shocked was probably too strong a word, but thrown off-balance, at least. This was unexpected for him. He looked around at the white hallway, the rows of shoes and coats, a couple of Barbara’s watercolors, the old school photos of Thea and her that hung on the wall facing the living room. Ben’s African-American genes revealed themselves in the form of dark, bright eyes and a warm skin tone. They were attractive children.
“They aren’t yours?” said Babko and pointed.
“No,” said Søren. “But I’m the godfather of the youngest one.”
Søren saw that the information was received and stored in the Babko computer, but what the Ukrainian thought about it, he couldn’t tell. Suddenly he himself grew uncertain about whether this was a good idea. Handcuffs and beatings with filled plastic water bottles. Fingers crushed in car doors. If Babko was one of the nasty boys, it wasn’t a good idea to show him a vulnerable point. Susse and her family might not be Søren’s family in a conventional way, but they were definitely a vulnerable point.
Trust. To earn it, you have to give it.
The dogs came racing in with snow pillows under their paws and snow in their fur. Søren gave them what he thought was a reasonable amount of dry food in the ceramic bowls in the kitchen. Then he opened the refrigerator. There was a pot with some kind of chicken stew, smelling of curry and onions—and a couple of good Belgian beers.
Might that not be enough to build a relationship of mutual trust?
BABKO PUSHED HIS empty plate away, stretched and yawned deeply and sincerely.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t really get any sleep last night.”
“Didn’t they offer you a bed?”
“Yes, but … I hoped Colonel Savchuk would return.”
It was the first time Babko had voluntarily mentioned the SBU colonel—a breakthrough for bicultural understanding? Søren decided to consider it a step forward.
“Why is it that both SBU and GUBOZ are so interested in the Doroshenko family?” he asked and took a modest sip of his beer.
Babko looked around the kitchen. Susse and Ben had combined the old kitchen with the dining room, so they sat at a large flea-market find of a table, surrounded by plants, IKEA shelves with books, records and CDs behind shiny glass doors and with a view of the bird feeder in the garden through a blue terrace door.
“It’s nice here,” he said.
Søren didn’t answer. He let the question stand.
Babko smiled crookedly. “You’re a patient man,” he said.
Søren continued to wait. Babko took a swallow of the Belgian beer. He sighed, an unusually deep sigh that would have seemed overly dramatic coming from a Dane. But it wasn’t. The sigh came from the same place as the laugh—from the bottom of his chest and possibly also from the bottom of Babko’s Ukrainian soul.
“Once,” he said, “I must have been eight or nine years old, it was a few years before the Independence … once we were going on a school trip, and the bus that came to pick us up was so dirty, you could barely look out the windows. My teacher asked the driver if he could at least wash the windshield so he could see safely. The driver just pointed to a certificate that indicated that the bus had been washed that morning, less than an hour ago. It clearly hadn’t been, but it didn’t matter; the certificate, with signature and stamp and everything, said it was clean, and so it was clean. My friend, do you understand what I am saying?”
“I’m not sure.” Søren was having a lot of trouble seeing the connection to Natasha Doroshenko, but he was willing to listen.
“The truth. The truth is what it says on the certificate. It’s completely beside the point if the window is covered in dirt and crap, as long as you have the paper saying it’s clean. That’s the way it was in Ukraine. That’s the way it still is, except that the people writing the certificates are replaced once in a while. And when you meet a man who actually looks at the window and not at the certificate, at the truth and not at the most convenient version of it—a man who wants to change Ukraine if he can—then you don’t believe it at first. You look for the hidden motives. You look at the money and wonder where it comes from. You wonder how he has gotten so far if he is really so clean.”
Søren sat completely still. He didn’t fidget with his utensils; he didn’t touch his beer. He didn’t want to risk interrupting Babko’s monologue. For the first time, he felt he was getting some insight into what went on behind the jovial mask.
“During the Orange Revolution, we thought there would be a new day,” Babko continued with a sudden hand gesture as if he were cutting something away. “We thought that corruption and the misuse of power would disappear or at least shrink, but nothing happened. There was just a new group of people writing the certificates. So you don’t believe it. For a long, long time you don’t believe it.”
Søren waited, but this time it seemed as if Babko had come to a halt again. “But then you become convinced?” Søren attempted to prompt him, not too lightly, not too hard, just the right amount of pressure.
“Little by little,” said Babko. “Little by little. When you have kept this man, this very clean man, under observation for more than two years on the orders of his opponents. After two years, you are convinced and deeply depressed.”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t stand a chance. We’ve been ordered to find something on him. We don’t find anything. Suddenly there is nonetheless a file of well-documented accusations, of corruption, witness statements, confessions and an arrest order. Fabricated from beginning to end, but it doesn’t matter. There are stamps and signatures and certificates, pages and pages of them.”